Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cebert | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have an issue being monitored if it means I can work from home more frequently. I think the data would help highlight that I’m more productive working from home than in the office due to less distractions and wasted commute time.

It would be helpful if firms monitoring productivity mentioned what they consider productivity to be. However, in doing this, it would also make it easy for individuals to game any productivity metrics.

It’s interesting that Teams tracks which device you join meetings on. I start my day on my work laptop around 7AM and my daily standup is at 9:30AM. I typically join the standup on my phone, and make coffee and have a snack. Our standup runs 30-45mins due to how it’s managed and doesn’t provide much value to me. I’m present and engaged during that time, but I wonder if it could be interpreted as me “joining a meeting from bed” as suggested in the article. I see it as a productivity gain as I can have my coffee break while still attending the standup.

I don’t get why it matters where you join a meeting from. If you’re in bed, so what? You’re still on the meeting aren’t you? If I can do my job perfectly fine sitting poolside, and still hit all my metrics, does it matter that I’m at a pool and not sitting at a desk?

That's not a trade-off you have to make. There are full remote jobs with no surveillance.

Workplace surveillance needs to be regulated swiftly and strongly.

This is the eternal problem with all such metrics. What the data actually says and what someone looking at it thinks it says can be very different things. And yet decisions will necessarily be made based on the latter and that can lead to bad decisions.

We could all live in a beautiful world with near-total honesty and little need to protect privacy. We just need the entire human race to be reliably fair and reasonable about every possible issue and to make decisions that affect others only based on a complete and entirely accurate set of relevant facts. Shouldn't be too hard.

I think the problem is more fundamental than just what "data says". I think in a sense the way you measure things carry a lot of information, of course, but the resulting data in itself doesn't tell anything without context. A good book that I think illustrates this is How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrel Huff.

> my daily standup is at 9:30AM. I typically join the standup on my phone, and make coffee and have a snack. Our standup runs 30-45mins due to how it’s managed and doesn’t provide much value to me

Ugh, I feel you on that. (tho I don't agree with the monitoring part, there's no need for it)

I just realized that I haven't had these silly daily standups for nearly a year now, since changing companies. And guess what? My team is the most productive team I ever worked in. I provide a weekly written update on the project I'm on for leadership to read. We had a weekly 15mins standup for a while when we needed a very tight loop between people on the project as one of the releases was coming up, then scrapped it when things went back to normal.

I don't miss the daily standups and scrummasters at all.

Daily standups can be performed via a Slack channel and a template.

even that is just noise

Same here. We switched to a standup channel where we just say what we did on the day.

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